Skeptic Overview 9

Aight, well I hear what you are saying, but keep in mind that I am using the same exact player to play both files. Before upload, tags are there in
the player. After upload, tags are missing. IN THE SAME PLAYER. So clearly something is being done to the file to change it from it's original
state.

I've just been doing a little bit of reading on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and iTunes submission, and found this article which may be useful in
a conceptual way.

Normalizing the Data

Once you have the feeds, you normalize the data into a format that you can easily work with. This may mean inserting the entries into a database as
rows or storing them in some other format. Storing in XML is a possibility, but you'll have to use additional XML processing tools to gather the
data, incurring a lot of overhead for processing and complexity. I find it most useful to rip the data from the feeds into a small database and then
re-extract it for analysis. This strategy allows me to select a fixed number of stories for analysis and also to store the data over time for more
long-term analysis.

Also, in regards to submission to iTunes, could you make some use of the tag to control which podcasts end up on the feed? Perhaps, using the above
suggestion of a seperate database (or table), maybe you could populate that database with podcasts that, say receive the most downloads and get the
most replies over a three day period. Then that database could drive the RSS feed. Apologies for the geekspeak.

All feed data is in a database, and one PHP template parses the material into the multiple feeds, depending on which feed you request (the /__.xml
attribute of the feed URL is actually the variable that defines which podcasts for which feed are pulled from the db).

good find Sri Oracle. That first link you posted was a really good read. Nice intro to complex systems theory and the paradoxical nature of some of
the principles that emerge from these systems. Ignorance is useful, who would have thought?
Then again, this site wouldn't really be here if it weren't for the existence of ignorance, would it

a researcher in this field, says there are five such principles: more members create differences, ignorance of individuals is useful, random
encounters should be encouraged and individuals must look for patterns in the signs and pay attention to their neighbors.

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